Prisoners: Autism

(asked on 14th May 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) men and (b) women in prison are on the autistic spectrum.


Answered by
Robert Buckland Portrait
Robert Buckland
This question was answered on 20th May 2019

The MoJ does not centrally hold specific information on the number of prisoners who are on the autistic spectrum, either within prisons or young offender’s institutions. The most recent, available data from the Department for Education (2014/15) shows that 0.25% of Offender Learners (defined as offenders aged 18 or over that participated in Skills Funding Agency funded learning while in the prison system) self-declared as having a learning difficulty classified within the Autistic Spectrum Disorder category. This represents 250 out of 101,600 learners. This data is not, however, separated out by gender.

The MoJ is committed to ensuring that all individuals who come into contact with the prison system are able to access the right support to help them engage with their sentence. We are therefore taking a number of steps to improve data collection on disability within prisons.

This includes work by HM Prisons and Probation Service looking at how disabilities data can be better categorised on the Prison National Offender Management System (P-NOMIS) for offenders aged 18 and over to improve staff awareness.

Health and justice partners are also working to establish the new Health and Justice Information Service (HJIS) to improve the link between prisons and community by introducing a system of sharing clinical records between community and prison on reception, and from prison back to the community on release.

Finally, the new adult prison education framework contracts, which commenced on 1 April, have introduced numerous improvements to the way prisoners aged 18 and over with learning difficulties and disabilities (LDD) are screened and provided with regular and consistent support throughout their sentence.

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